Social Networking and Congress: This is Getting Ridiculous

Alright, so I know I have ranted on this before, but the video I just saw on Politicker has me riled up again. Here is the video:

Notice a few things here. First, the poster the guy is holding in the video spells YouTube wrong. Bad sign. Second, McCotter has only had the account for 3 days, after the whole Twittergate scandel broke.

Now this isn't just some tech geek having a gotcha moment with a screen shot (it is that, but not just that). The point I made in my earlier post is that bringing the franking rules up-to-date was something that both Republicans and Democrats could have both supported and worked together to do in a timely and cooperative fashion. Unfortunately, the Republicans don't want to let that happen.

I'm a true believer in the concept of Congress 2.0 and using the new tools the internet has provided us to enable our elected officials to communicate more effectively. As a matter of fact, most of the Democrats and young voters I have spoken to agree. The idea that the Republicans have turned this into a partisan battle sickens me, especially since there isn't really any disagreement to be fighting about. They have created a straw man argument in order to call the Democrats Stalinists and use all those Russian sounding Communist words they remember using back in the Cold War.

Progressive organizations have been leading the way in the use of the internet and social networking tools in the political sphere. The Republican Party is not the great defender of the freedom of the internet (just look at their stances on net neutrality).

So how about we stop with the rhetoric and name-calling, put our Russian-to-English dictionaries away, and actually work to get these rules updated since it's something almost all of us agree on. And please try to spell the name of the website right in a video that you are posting to that website.

So that's my rant. If you were expecting a useful internet tip or something I actually wrote one on my personal blog. Ironically, it is about the self-populating Twitter links used by the Let Our Congress Tweet site.

So, what are your thoughts on this whole thing? Let us know in the comments.